The writers George Orwell and Ray Bradbury imagined a future of totalitarian censorship. HG Wells wrote of a "world brain" centralising all known knowledge while Margaret Atwood foresaw state control of women's reproduction in The Handmaiden's Tale.

Now a version of that future is here, says a number of high profile Australian authors who have joined hundreds of writers from around the world to demand an end to mass surveillance (code named PRISM) revealed by the former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Miles Franklin award winners Anna Funder, Frank Moorhouse and David Malouf have joined Pulitzer Prize winners Jennifer Egan, Geraldine Brooks, Richard Ford, and Jane Smiley, and Man Booker Prize winners Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan in signing a petition, an initiative called Writers Against Mass Surveillance, urging world leaders to take a stand against cyber spying.

The global collective action challenges the power of intelligence services to eavesdrop on emails, conversations on mobile phones and collate data from internet searches.

The public have yet to grasp the worrying implications of Snowden's disclosures, which reveal that security agencies have cracked the encryption codes for web and mobile phone services, says Moorhouse, and they do not understand that their everyday conversations can be tracked.

Under immediate threat is lawyer-client privilege, as evidenced by ASIO's recent swoop on a Canberra lawyer involved in East Timor's bid to scrap an oil treaty worth billions of dollars, itself a dispute brought on by spying claims, according to Moorhouse.

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He says the collection of metadata also has all sorts of unintended consequences for Australians, including journalists confidential relationships with sources.

"There is a collapse of the traditional boundaries of personal privacy but also a collapse of the state to keep its secrets, which may be a good thing and a bad thing."

Abuse of data collected from mobile devices, emails, social networks and via internet searches amounted to theft, and overturned the presumption of innocence, the global authors' petition said.

The 500 writers want government leaders to explain how the data swept up by intelligence agencies is being kept and to give citizens access to it, and the right to correct it.

Last month American members of PEN, an activist group defending free expression, published a study showing writers there were self-censoring their work, curbing social media interactions and avoiding certain subjects because of surveillance concerns.

As a child growing up in Bulgaria, the German-based author and activist Ilija Trojanow's flat was bugged. "As an adult I had the bizarre privilege of reading in the Secret Service files what my parents and other relatives were discussing then. It is remarkable that once the camera or the microphone is directed towards you, you can no longer be innocent. Any statement by them was construed and misconstrued as being proof of their subversive tendencies."

This year, Trojanow was initially denied entry to the United States to attend a conference on surveillance. No reason was given by Homeland Security. "Imagine every budding thought, still vague and rough, immediately exposed to the limelight of an unforgiving public. It would shrivel and shrink. Before a text or any other creative expression is presented to the public it needs hours, weeks and months of intimacy. Investigative journalism for example would be impossible without the privacy of secured anonymity."